My first meal will be my beloved oven chips with two eggs

IAM struggling to keep my newly found inner peace at the moment. In fact, I’m in a turmoil of emotions ranging from excitement to fear. As usual it is worse at night when silence rules the corridors and the large French windows with their shroud of black shutters give no light back.

In my bed neither book nor computer block my thoughts and my mind once again goes racing into areas I’d rather not. Scenes – bad scenes – are conjured up and along with them possible outcomes that set my heart racing and my breathing grow shallow and fast.

For all has changed here yet again. I am no longer crossing the road to the other unit, thank God. I would have gone downhill fast in there I know.

No, I’m going home. Home to Las Molieres. Home alone with this time no César, no companion guardian by my side to mind and keep me company as the hours tick by.

It seems now that with my walking much improved and, bizarrely, my general health too, they feel I can do it. They have more faith in me I think than I have.

Having been here since March it feels as if I am about to step off a precipice, hands tied behind my back, and no-one there any longer to catch me.

I will not always be alone. A nurse will check me morning and late evening. An aide will possibly, if I wish, come in three or four times a week to see what help I might need around the house.

A physio will come daily and with her help I hope to master walking outside again and strive for balance control.

A prescription will be given for wheelchair and Zimmer, although I hope to use them as little as possible and return myself to an upright human position.

And I have the devoted Miriam for whom I give daily thanks.

She will come morning and night to unshutter and shutter the house

– the first check of the day. She will also get any shopping, prescriptions I need, and will do the housework.

Finally, we have come to a financial arrangement for that which makes me feel immeasurably better but in no way recompenses for million kindnesses she shows me and has shown me over the years.

Deb and Alistair too are ready to come whether called or not and also do shopping.

They will dose me with English and a shared black humour sadly absent in Miriam.

For the obvious and many reasons life at LM cannot be as it was before. I must move often not sit peering into the world from my Mac with a vin close to hand.

And, despite the circumstances, I must come to terms with the loneliness of my isolation which was eating me far more than I realised before all this happened.

I must strive to cook properly to keep up my strength for the treatments still to come and not rely on vin rouge and crisps as a substitute for dinner.

I already know my first meal though – yes, my beloved oven chips with two eggs cracked in for the final minutes.

I must hope the treatment side effects are deal-able with when alone and frightened but if not the SSR where I am have promised they will bring me back to deal with them.

But worst of all I must learn, the most important is to try to live without César, my mad beautiful boy nuzzling at my feet or disdainfully refusing my entreaties to come in for the night and stop howling at the moon.

Learn to live without his long hound nose nudging my arm and elbow for attention; his deep sleep breathing on the tiles by my side; his Afghan perfume as he dances around me.

Today on her visit, tears streaming, I asked Miriam if she would remove his feeding bowls and bed to the attic before I entered the house a week from tomorrow.

Already thought of and done. As an aside she says, if I want, she will stay all night on the first night. I want.

I will still see them of course, and him, but I’ll not feel him as I often did Portia, for he lives on apparently happy elsewhere.

And no, I won’t ask for him to be brought to me to visit for I couldn’t take seeing him being driven away.

The real fear will come with nightfall for I have always been frightened of the dark and the countryside outside LM has a cloying blackness peculiar to La France Profonde.

It presses on the face, suffocating, invasive, alien, and the clarity of the stars does not make up for that unless in the presence of another awe-struck human.

And I hope that Las Molieres herself will be kinder to me – remember the love I lavished on her in those early years before I felt her turn.

Fanciful I know but houses have souls and somewhere along the line I upset hers.

Well, I’ll find out soon enough.

There will be one more column from here and I should already be home when you read it.

Wish me luck. Onwards and upward…once more.